HI all,
I'm currently experiencing a problem trying to use a Sun Quad FastEthernet (PCI) on a Netra T1 105.
I'm using a 2.4.21 kernel, that correctly recognizes the onboard hme and qfe cards; ifconfig works ok, but nothing gets actually sent or reveived over the qfe interfaces (while the two onboard hme work fine).
I tried to recompile the drivers as a module (sunhme.o), no luck.
I saw a message about an experimental liveCD solving some problems on Netra X1 network drivers; is it a patched kernel?

At the time I put that together, yes that was a patched kernel. However you can get all the patches I used (minus the hme patch for ultra 1 enterprises) in the 2.4.23_pre series. The driver that was added was for the tg3 series adapters.

Do the link lights on the card come up when cables are plugged in? Does linux seem to auto-negotiate a speed for the interfaces when they are in the UP state?

Jason,
everything really seems to be "normal" (the lights come up, linux negotiates the speed etc); some time ago, I tried with a Debian based on 2.4.21, resulting in a number of hangs (the system got freezed, just being able to poweroff to lom>) when I just tried to ping some host!
I'm trying with a vanilla 2.4.22 kernel...

Jason,
I finally got the solution: the problem seems to be related to interrupt routing; I followed the instruction at http://news.gw.com/openbsd.sparc/2401 and set my eth0 as follows from the OpenBoot PROM:

(/pci@1f,0/pci@1/pci@1/pci@f/SUNW,qfe@0,1 is where my first interface QFE is mapped)
..."magically" everything started to work, even with the 2.4.21-r1 series on the Gentoo liveCD.
Should I report this as an "official" bug? Is it already known?
Thanks

This is *exactly* what I was looking for. I have an old SparcStation5 with an SBUS QFE card, and up until now I was stumped on how to get the networking up (this is slated to be a firewall as well).

Unfortunately, it didn't completely make the issue go away...

After setting up the nvramrc on the box and booting into Gentoo, I'm able to ping anything on the local networks (yay! finally!), but as soon as I try to do anything with DNS (like an rsync or a ping www.somewhere.com), the QFE-specific interfaces are somehow affected. I can still ping the actual interfaces from the local box, but nothing on the local networks or anywhere else (I get 100% packet loss).

My /etc/resolv.conf is setup correctly to point to my ISPs primary and secondary DNS servers -- I use the same configuration on my existing firewall with no issues.

On a LAN workstation, I can run a persistent ping to the eth1 interface address successfully. The second I try to do something like "ping www.yahoo.com" from the sparcstation, the persistent ping begins to timeout to the previously available interface. If I then try to ping the IP address of the workstation from the sparcstation, I get 100% packet loss and errors. Prior to pinging yahoo, the sparcstation was able to successfully ping all the IPs I tried...

The only way to get the sparcstation to talk on layer 3 again is to restart it. I can use the built-in HME interface without these issues, but I need to be able to leverage the QFE interfaces to make this firewall anything worth using...

Any ideas on this? Is this a related issue, or did I miss something? It seems like a DNS issue almost, but that shouldn't take down a network interface like it appears to be here..._________________-H0bb3z-
-----------
Intel QX9770 | 6Gb DDR3 | ATI 4870 HD 1Gb | 2xSeagate 1Tb SATAs
Running Funtoo Core2 build

An interesting additional bit of information: I disabled DNS lookups by changing the "hosts" line in /etc/nsswitch.conf from

Code:

hosts files dns

to

Code:

hosts files

Now the interfaces always stay up on the QFE card. Of course, I can't resolve anything on the firewall, but that may be just fine. Anyone heard of QFE cards having this issue with DNS?_________________-H0bb3z-
-----------
Intel QX9770 | 6Gb DDR3 | ATI 4870 HD 1Gb | 2xSeagate 1Tb SATAs
Running Funtoo Core2 build

E220R's are likely PCI though, so it may be related to SBUS versions of the card. I think I saw somewhere in the documentation where SBUS QFE cards were not fully supported. I may be out of luck..._________________-H0bb3z-
-----------
Intel QX9770 | 6Gb DDR3 | ATI 4870 HD 1Gb | 2xSeagate 1Tb SATAs
Running Funtoo Core2 build

You should actually see it as 4 separate interfaces -- each RJ45 in the quad card is a separate network interface. You can apply any networking configuration to one or all of them independently as you would if you had four single interface cards.

I believe there is also a way to bridge two or more interfaces into a single logical interface to increase throughput/resiliency, but I haven't had to venture into that realm at this point..._________________-H0bb3z-
-----------
Intel QX9770 | 6Gb DDR3 | ATI 4870 HD 1Gb | 2xSeagate 1Tb SATAs
Running Funtoo Core2 build